On Tuesday November 12 2002 01:30 pm, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 Nov 2002 7:26 pm, you wrote:
> > That's why I think it's important to let businesses know that they
> > are losing sales due to their agreement with MS, that's the only
> > language they understand: the almighty dollar.
>
> Perhaps we should also point them at the Linux counter, to see just
> how many sales they could be losing? The 'estimate' page has some
> interesting and thought-provoking statistics.
>
> Anne
For most hardware vendors, sales to Linux users would only be 1 or 2%
of their sales. Hardly worth risking M$ ire and possible legal tangles
by making their driver source and specs available, even thru NDA's, to
such a small segment of their possible market.
Probly the most notable and popular example is nVidia. Their Linux
drivers will never be open, or even up to par with their M$ drivers.
Even if they were willing and motivated to do so, their current (long
term) agreements and contract$ with M$ prevent them from doin so.
OTOH, a recent proponent of Linux, SGI, has broken with former
partners M$ and nVidia and is helping the Linux community with their
intellectual property and specs. XFree86 now can support 3d accel (about
30% performance of what the closed source drivers will) for nVidia
cards. VA Linux is also a partner in this endeavor. Credit Hollywood
and their recent switch to rendering movies with Linux clusters for
this new found 'enlightenment'. Another help could be 2nd and 3rd
world companies, governments, and users rejecting M$ and gravitating to
Linux.
So there's hope. BUT only if a large percentage of the world market
rejects win-fake-hardware and M$, which would entice vendors to
actively support their hardware on other than M$ OS's. I don't see
that happening anytime soon on desktop systems. There's unfortunately
also an increasing percentage of Linux users willing to accept
win-fake-junk hardware, and are tickled pink when they get any kind of
a closed source proprietary driver to make it sort'a kind'a work. Which
makes the even situation worse, not better.
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
